Bitcoin block art? Marathon showcases visualization potential of block building

Marathon Digital explores the potential of “block art” by using its mining pool to craft the order of transactions in a block.

A Bitcoin Core contributor has immortalized Marathon Digital’s logo into the data visualization of a Bitcoin block by using the mining firm’s template building tools.

X user Portland.HODL laid claim to the intriguing piece of “block art”, a custom graphic crafted by ordering transactions in a block that can be then seen on Bitcoin indexer website. Blockchain indexers visualize bitcoin transactions using square blocks and color gradients based on transaction sizes and fee rates.

Marathon Digital shared details of block 836361 which it successfully mined on March 26. The firm dubbed it the M block and wanted the visualization to demonstrate its template building capabilities and technology stack.

The company explained that by owning its mining pool, it can craft the order of transactions to create a form of block art. While not offering this specific output capability as a service, the mining company speculated that this could present a wave of creative potential not yet explored in the Bitcoin space.

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Marathon also noted that the Bitcoin network should exclude blocks from full pay-per-share (FPPS) calculations to ensure more accurate miner fee estimates. This is to avoid any effect that Marathon’s experiments might have on network fees.

Portland.HODL claims to have successfully crafted the block’s visualization through a long process of trial and error.

The process of creating this block art made use of OP_RETURN transactions in the Bitcoin protocol. This is a type of transaction that allows for a small amount of arbitrary data to be included in a transaction.

The data is typically used for embedding messages or metadata onchain. If a user carefully crafts the content of these OP_RETURN transactions and orders them correctly, an image or pattern emerges when the block data is visualized.

Before a block is mined, all transactions wait in an area called the mempool. A miner can create numerous transactions to generate this kind of art once mined into a block. They would develop transactions with outputs that, when visualized, correspond to the pixels of the desired image.

Creating block art would also require a miner to modify their software to select specific transactions that will form the desired pattern instead of prioritizing transactions that maximize profit based on the fee density or satoshis per byte.

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There is also the rest of the network to contend with. Mining a block with a specific set of transactions that will form an image or text, requires significant hashing power like that of Marathon.

Cointelegraph has reached out to Marathon and Portland.HODL for further details on the “M block” and the ramifications of block composability.

Marathon launched a direct BTC transaction submission service in February 2024 designed to facilitate and speed up large and complex Bitcoin transactions.

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